Introduction

Urban studies as a field is on the rise in Africa, environmental studies is a mainstay of scholarship on or about the continent, and urban environments are increasingly central to urban studies as a field. Yet, it is still rare to find works that offer political-environmental analyses of urban issues or urban analyses of environmental issues for Africa. This is beginning to change, but thus far, most of the works produced target one issue—for example, water or solid waste—and usually for one city. Many of the few broader analyses of urban environments come in rather dry policy documents or superficial observations from Western journalists, meaning that key aspects of political, economic, and cultural dimensions are shortchanged. In the study of Africa's urban environments, there is need for works that cover an array of environmental issues in a range of cities, and from a variety of political and scholarly perspectives, to provide readers—whether scholars, policymakers, students, or the interested public—with a fuller picture of urban Africa's multi-vocality and its complexities.

To try to meet that need, I first face several conceptual challenges. The biggest of these challenges concerns how to “read” Africa's urban environments. Are they an utter mess caused by incompetent governance and an absence of environmental consciousness? Are they manifestations of the “environmentalism of the poor” (Martinez-Alier, 2003; Nixon, 2011a, 2011b), as churning sites of devastation and contestation? Are they a combination of these two? Or are they fundamentally impossible to uniformly characterize in the first place given the incredible diversity of the continent's cities? There are no neat answers to these questions. Instead, in this book, I offer a range of readings of, or ways of reading, the diverse and complex environments of cities on the continent.

I begin by acknowledging the obvious reality that it is impossible to cover all aspects of urban environments for all cities of Africa. In this Introduction's next section, I make note of the book's geographical and methodological parameters and work to begin setting the limits of what I am examining in terms of urban environments.